The Epic Real-Life Friendship Behind an Acclaimed Novel

Three college guys used to hang out at a house a few blocks from the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Two of them lived there; the third was a close friend who lived at his fraternity but spent most of his time at the rented house on North Street. 

The three, all English majors from other states, were smart and well read. Individually, none would have been considered charismatic, but together they were witty, free flowing, and magnetic. 

Other students dropped by the house to enjoy the banter and intellectual stimulation. They were juniors and seniors, 20 or 21 years old, and they talked about the kinds of silly things that college students talk about when they have time on their hands. But the three guys—J.B., Jeff, and Kevin—also were interested in big ideas. They parried verbally as they talked about their professors, what they’d read recently, and what was in the news. 

The writer Lily King, another English major from out of state, was drawn to them when they all were Carolina students in the mid-1980s. 

“Our university was big, but these three guys had created a tiny, cozy world within it,” King wrote in a 2020 article in Vogue. “The rest of the fall and winter we played Hearts and argued about Reagan’s reelection; we talked in Irish accents and quoted James Joyce … With the three of them, I was always giddy from the banter.”

King wrote about the love triangle between her, J.B., and Jeff. She first dated J.B., who she met in their 17th century literature class, but fell in love with Jeff. 

King wrote about the three men again last year in her well-regarded novel, Heart the Lover. The New York Times and The Washington Post reviewed it warmly. TIME magazine ranked it first in its list of the 10 best books of the year. 

“What begins as the hormone-fueled story of a campus love triangle, punctuated by bad sex and the heady banter of English majors, reveals itself to hold far greater weight,” wrote TIME’s Lucy Feldman.

Neither the real-life story nor the novel has a happy ending. Kevin Wolf died of lymphoma in 2001 at 38. Jeff Darsie died of lung cancer in 2019 at 56. J.B. Howard tended to both of them in their last days. (Disclosure: Howard has been a good friend since college, and I knew Wolf and Darsie through him; I never met King at UNC-CH.) 

The novel has created a buzz among their old college friends, now in their 60s, about what’s fiction and what’s not. But what’s unquestionably real is the unusual male friendship that King portrays in Heart the Lover. 

“It’s three guys who loved each other,” said their friend Jeb Saunders, a state government lawyer who lives in Chapel Hill. “But for Kevin and Jeff dying, they would have remained life-long friends. What a gift that was to have that friendship at such a young age.” 

They left an imprint on King, even decades after she first hung out with them.

“I don’t know that I see that quality of male friendship very often,” she told me. “I don’t know how much in everyday life men really lean on each other and care for each other.”

The Triumvirate

The first time Howard met Wolf, when they were high school seniors, he detested him. They were invited to Chapel Hill for a weekend in late February as finalists for the prestigious Morehead Scholarship. Howard, from Baltimore, thought Wolf, from New Jersey, was an insufferably arrogant northeasterner. Wolf walked around the leafy old campus all weekend with his nose up in the air, Howard told me.

Six months later, they both were Morehead Scholars living in Old East dorm, just a few steps from the Old Well, the best-known landmark at the university. This time, they hit it off. Howard later wrote to friends that Wolf “turned out to be the most good-hearted, caring, and interesting friend anyone could ever have.” 

Darsie, a horse-racing fan from Kentucky and a passionate reader, also lived in the dorm. The three discovered they had a lot in common. They stayed up most of an October night talking, which was the beginning of a conversation that lasted for years. 

Their friends appreciated their intellects and passion for exploring ideas. 

“They were really impressive,” said Tim Sullivan, who became the CEO of Ancestry.com and now lives in Chapel Hill (Sullivan is a member of The Assembly’s board). “They were the reminder to me of why we were here [at the university]. They so clearly admired each other as friends and respected each other.”

Wolf, the most extroverted of the three, could be zany. He called himself the Wolf Man and poked fun at himself by mock-bragging about his dating skills. His friends say, chuckling, that the character in the novel based on Wolf (his name is Ivan) fits him perfectly.

In the novel, Ivan/Kevin returns to their unnamed college town after visiting Ireland in the summer. 

“Then he tells us about the landlord’s daughter, the ferryman’s sister, and a pretty French girl on the flight home who told him in a sexy accent if they didn’t hold hands during takeoff the plane would crash,” writes the female narrator. “But once they were safely in the air she let go and refused to speak to him for the rest of the flight. He is amused that everything he says delights us.” 

Wolf taught himself Mandarin Chinese and was fluent. He later moved to Hong Kong and pursued beautiful Asian women, which Howard said was “as ardent and quixotic as it was hilarious.” 

“I adored Kevin,” said Carolyn Griffin Hall, who frequented the North Street house in college and is now a community volunteer in Nashville, Tennessee. “He was so funny. He was like a little quirky gnome. He was delightful and super smart.” 

While Wolf was exuberant, Darsie had an endearing sense of humor about his foibles and predicaments. 

His six-page handwritten letter (on a yellow legal pad, as usual) to a former professor in 1995 was classic Darsie. He described reading Dylan Thomas’ nostalgic poem “Fern Hill” to his dying father as he lived his last days wheelchair-bound at his Kentucky farmhouse. Also present were Darsie’s brother and stepmother.

Jeff Darsie began bravely but was overcome with emotion as he sought to meet the moment with the perfect farewell. He struggled to finish, but did. 

Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,

Time held me green and dying 

Though I sang in my chains like the sea

He thought his family was deeply touched—until he realized they were actually trying not to laugh. “Everyone was grateful and relieved when I started laughing also,” Darsie wrote. 

Howard was the quietest of the three. He was an English and Classics major, studying the major Greek and Latin authors. He also played backup goalie on a UNC-Chapel Hill men’s lacrosse team that won a national championship. 

Howard stood out on a team of ruffians. Saunders, a lacrosse teammate, grew his hair long in an effort to fit in. Howard didn’t change his fumbling, over-caffeinated, coffee-drinking persona nor his daily uniform of button-down oxford cloth shirts and khakis. 

Though quirky, he had a measured, mature-beyond-his-years sense of who he was. His teammates respected him for it, and many thought he was the most interesting guy on the team. 

Louise Gilbert Freeman, an artist and former college English professor who lives in Virginia, was friends with Darsie at prep school and with all three in Chapel Hill. She and her college friends called them The Triumvirate. 

“They were intellectual compatriots, but they were also bonded in the way typical of male college friends—lots of jocular ribbing, a shared private lexicon,” she wrote in an unpublished essay after Darsie died. “I was flattered to be included somewhere in that charmed circle, even as a ripple at the outer rim. I cared so much what they thought of me.”

Lean on Me

They stayed close after college. All three went to law school, Wolf and Darsie at the University of Michigan and Howard at the University of Virginia. 

Wolf worked for an international law firm in Hong Kong, returned to the U.S., and never married. Darsie was involved with King on and off for a decade, but they ultimately split and established a long friendship; he stayed single. Howard married, had three sons (one named after Darsie), and divorced. 

The three men worked their schedules to see each other at least a half dozen times a year. They got together in New York City, at the beach, at weddings, on a cycling trip to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. 

“There was always something to look forward to,” Howard told me recently. “We all found each other interesting in some way. It’s a unique friendship when you can create this world that you’re happy in with two other friends.” 

He added, “I liked being around two guys who were really, really smart, and smarter than I was. We pushed each other in that way.” It was truly a three-way friendship, he said; there was never a time when one was excluded by the others. 

Only death did that. Wolf got cancer in the late 1990s. Howard and Darsie stayed close to him in his last years, researching his illness, arranging visits with his old friends, urging him on. On a train ride to New York to see Wolf, Darsie said to Howard, “Do you realize how hard this is going to be when he dies?”

“Kevin fought really, really hard,” Howard said. Wolf endured a long period of chemo and radiation, hope, and despair. He died in New Jersey in 2001 with Darsie and Howard at his side. 

Darsie and Howard’s friendship, already strong, was cemented in their late 30s by Wolf’s death. For more than a decade, the two worked for the Maryland attorney general. They saw each other regularly, with Darsie becoming Uncle Jeff to Howard’s three sons. 

Years before, when they were young, Darsie’s romance with King had strained their friendship. King and Howard broke up at the end of Howard’s senior year in 1985, long before the Internet and cell phones. When Howard returned to the U.S. from a summer trip to Europe, he learned his close friend and his former girlfriend, who were still students, were dating. 

He was angry, not because he had hoped to re-kindle his relationship with King, he told me, but because he thought Darsie had broken an Ernest Hemingway-esque code of masculine friendship. A man didn’t date his close friend’s former girlfriend, especially right after their breakup. 

King knew all of this. She and Darsie kept their relationship entirely separate from his friendship with Howard. If Howard was in town and the guys went to a party, she could not go. If Darsie called Howard, King was not in the room. 

In Vogue and in the novel, she describes their predicament in similar language. Darsie would lose his friendship with Howard if he chose King; King would lose Darsie if he chose Howard. 

It might have appeared that way at the time, but in the end, Howard and Darsie (and Wolf) remained close. Darsie’s romance with King “created a real strain on my friendship with Jeff,” Howard wrote in a recent email to friends. “But there was no force in the universe that was going to break our friendship with each other and with Kevin.” 

One Night Only

Darsie, a long-time smoker, was diagnosed with cancer in late 2016. Howard accompanied him on doctor’s visits. When Darsie was hospitalized for the final time in March 2019 in Baltimore, Howard slept for several weeks on a fold-out chair in the room, and he spoke throughout the day with Darsie’s doctors and nurses about his treatment. 

Howard also urged King, who lives in Maine, to visit—and quickly. When she arrived, she joined a raucous party in the hospital room, an NCAA tournament basketball game blaring from the TV amidst cheering and shouting. Darsie was in bed, hooked up to oxygen, his chest exposed, but joyous to be surrounded by the people he loved most.

Darsie was witty, as usual. You should do stand-up comedy, someone said. 

“Yeah,” he responded, according to one of his friends. “‘Jeff Darsie—One Night Only.’”

Everyone in that room during Darsie’s last week felt a kind of mystic power. Freeman, his friend from prep school, said Darsie allowed his friends to see him raw and exposed, stripping them of everything superficial or extraneous. 

The parade of people finally dissipated one night. King writes movingly in the Vogue article about being alone with Howard and Darsie in his last hours, joined by Wolf’s spirit. “His evil grin and cackle laugh—he came back then and sat in the room with us,” she wrote. “I could hear him shuffling the cards.”

King’s hospital visit marked the first time she’d seen Howard in decades. He was kind and warm and grateful for her presence, “even though I’d almost ruined their friendship decades ago,” she wrote. 

She’d never considered her romance with Darsie from Howard’s point of view. What if her best friend had started dating Darsie as soon as she left town? Would she have forgiven her? Would King have slept in her hospital room night after night?

King told me that being with Darsie and the others at the end was “heartbreaking and excruciatingly beautiful all at the same time.” She felt honored and privileged to be included. 

As a novelist, King said, “You have to let the characters do what they’re going to do.” But she said she wanted to capture Darsie’s essence, as well as his friendship with Howard—a kind of male friendship she’d never seen before. That friendship is the big story in her book, she’s often told. She agrees. 

As Darsie was dying, Howard created a Facebook page, “Darse World,” for friends and family to honor and reminisce about him. After he died, Howard posted about their friendship with Wolf, not wanting their compatriot to be forgotten. 

“Losing him 18 years ago was a searing, life-changing experience for Jeff and me,” he wrote. Howard lost contact with Wolf’s family. But when he beckoned them in the spring of 2019, Wolf’s siblings and mother traveled to the Baltimore hospital to visit Darsie one last time. 

Howard thought he was holding it all together at the hospital, but when he saw the Wolf family, the floodgates opened. Their presence was a reminder of the pain and joy of a friendship that started long ago on an October night in an old dorm, three freshmen excited about finding their way forward in a new world full of promise. 

“Kevin and Jeff are together now,” he wrote. “I can’t wait to see them again.”